GitHub provides Enterprise customers with the ability to programmatically retrieve enterprise and organization audit log events in near real-time using the audit log API. A high-quality audit log is an essential tool used by enterprises to ensure compliance, maintain security, investigate issues, and promote accountability. To support these objectives, the audit log API needs to be highly reliable, consistently available, and extremely scalable.
Recognizing the audit log API's importance as a data source to enterprises, each audit log API endpoint will impose a rate limit of 15 queries per minute per enterprise or org starting August 1st, 2023. Based on a thorough analysis of event generation data, we are confident that the new rate limit will continue to support customers in accessing near real-time data via the audit log API. Additionally, query cost is a crucial consideration, and in the future, the audit log may impose further rate limiting for high-cost queries that place significant strain on our data stores.
What can you do to prepare for these changes? First, programs or integrations querying the audit log API should be adjusted to query at a maximum frequency of 15 queries per minute. Additionally, applications querying the audit log API should be updated to be capable of honoring HTTP 429 responses, enabling them to dynamically adjust to the back-pressure exerted by our systems. Alternatively, Enterprises seeking access to near real-time data should consider streaming your enterprise audit log.